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The outspoken minority

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When people form an opinion, they often agree with the majority. This is a long known phenomenon.
What is new is that social networks make use of precisely this phenomenon and thus significantly contribute to the formation of opinion. This is how the opinions of individuals can be exploited by clever networking and frequent posts – and especially with the use of Bots – in social media to suddenly result in a whole movement. It is all the more important, then, to constantly question and reflect on web content.
An example of opinion formation: the majority illusion

Studies have shown that what people in social networks perceive to be a majority opinion is often nothing more than an illusion. An American researcher Kristina Lerman of the University of Southern California has been working on this issue. She found out some remarkable things in connection with social networks and opinion formation: The process of how opinions are shaped has taken an entirely new dimension with the advent of social networks like Facebook or Twitter. She shows this in the following example.

The 14 icons in the graphic above represent 14 different persons who are active in social networks. The three orange-colored individuals espouse an opinion that differs from the opinion of the gray people. So, it’s an opinion that is only held by the minority (3 from14). But the orange nodes – as opposed to the gray ones – are very active. They are connected to many more nodes, and especially important is that they are also connected to many gray nodes.

The more often they post their opinion on a certain topic, the more all of their “friends” are confronted with it. If the gray people – as shown in the graphic– are then also less active and are friends with more orange than gray people, they are presented with an illusion that the orange opinion is the majority opinion. The inclination is then to succumb to the illusion – even if in fact only a minority held the opinion at the outset.

Important terms on the subject

In the current debates on the formation of opinion several important terms are actually resurgent, some of which have been around for a long time in areas of research on freedom of expression and media effects.

Setting the agenda is about raising issues into the public consciousness for broad discussion, i.e. getting everybody to focus on certain things. It came about as a theory in 1972 in reference to the mass media of the time. The topics that get presented and thus supposedly represent reality are only a slice of objective reality. Journalists act as gatekeepers, who take a previously undefined topic or event and turn it into news.

Media and journalists exert a great power on public opinion formation through their ability to set the agenda. While they are unable to tell people what to think directly, they do dictate what people begin to form their opinions about. With the advent of the internet and social networks, many more actors have been able to take up roles as opinion leaders alongside the journalists.
More in our “Opinion formation” dossier
/mediabase/img/4694.jpg Young people are not only demonstrating their political commitment, but also how digital media can be used for social and political processes. Participate instead of just running along
/mediabase/img/cache/4901_740x740.jpg Teachtoday spoke with Björn Milbradt about the role of digitization in promoting democracy. Interview with Dr. Björn Milbradt

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